While 23.65 million Chinese people in rural areas still cannot afford daily food and clothes and another 40.67 million rural residents are earning between 683 yuan (US$85) to 944 yuan per person a year, the country has cut the amount of people below the poverty line by 20.35 million between 2001 and 2005, a senior official of the State Council said, Xinhua news agency reported today. The official poverty line is set by China at 944 yuan per year.

Liu Jian, director of the central government's poverty relief office, said during a national poverty-fighting conference that China has decreased the number of the rural residents who cannot afford food and clothes by 5.62 million in the past five years.

China has built 800 training centers around the country to fight poverty and has established a nationwide training network since 2001, training 3.18 million rural residents and supporting many enterprises to lift poor families above the poverty line.

As the remaining impoverished families are in even worse condition, the cost to lift them out of poverty is greater. The country managed to take 1.12 million rural residents out of poverty on average for the previous five years, much fewer than the numbers in the 1980s and 1990s.

The country now has about 148,000 poor villages, mainly in the Qing-Tibet Plateau area.